A. Individual Paper Abstracts (in alphabetical order by author's last name) Abbott, Don, [email protected] Academic institution: University of California, Davis The Geometer as Rhetor: Thomas Hobbes on the Performance of Rhetoric Thomas Hobbes’s chance encounter of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry proved to be a defining moment in his life. Hobbes’s biographer reports that working through a problem posed by Euclid “made him in love with geometry.” So profound was this love of geometry that many scholars believe it caused Hobbes’s to reject humanism and rhetoric in an effort to replace traditional disciplines with scientific and mathematical knowledge. Yet while Hobbes certainly pursued mathematics with enthusiasm, he did not necessarily conclude that geometry and rhetoric are incompatible. Science (and philosophy), says Hobbes, is the “knowledge of the consequences of words.” This knowledge, like geometry itself, must begin with the recognition of first principles which are then rendered into precise definitions. The “sorts” of sciences, says Hobbes “are many, according to the diversity of the Matter” and he specifically includes rhetoric among these. He accompanies his definition of science with a chart categorizing the entirety of human knowledge. Rhetoric is one of the forms of knowledge which derives from the “consequences of speech” together with ethics, poetry, logic, and “the science of the just and the unjust.” Hobbes, then, assigns rhetoric a place among the human sciences, and yet he remains a persistent critic of rhetoric. It is important to note, however, that Hobbes criticizes not the science of rhetoric, but rather its performance. It is the performance of rhetoric by unscrupulous orators that causes sedition and chaos because powerful speakers “can turn their Auditors out of fools into madmen.” Hobbes’s program, then, especially in Leviathan, is to find a way to reform rhetoric in order to make its performance consistent with the principles of geometry. For despite his criticism of it, Hobbes understood that rhetoric was required for the realization of his own political ideals. Some critics of Hobbes argue that he reduces rhetoric to merely “a servant of science.” I suggest it may be the other way round: Hobbes seeks to employ the scientific method to rehabilitate rhetoric thereby ensuring the perfection of “a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill.” - 1 - Agell, Fredrik, [email protected] Academic institution: Södertörn University The Birth of Philosophy out of Rhetoric: Nietzsche's Reappraisal of the Sophists and Hostile View towards Plato and Socrates My paper is a shortened version of my forthcoming book on Nietzsche’s severe criticism of Plato and Socrates and his corresponding reappraisal of the Sophists. The book presents a comprehensive image of the Sophists’ importance to Nietzsche, but also sheds new light on Nietzsche’s views on rhetoric, an often missunderstood topic, not the least among deconstructive theorists. The introduction outlines Nietzsche’s view on Plato, Socrates and the Sophists, and pays particular attention to lectures, working notes and reading matters. The ambiguous post-Kantian attitude towards metaphysics is shown to lie at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophical endeavour. As science, metaphysics is dead, but as inner ‘need’ metaphysics is inherent in man; that is the opinion of Kant and later on that of Schopenhauer, F.A. Lange – and the young Nietzsche. After the break with Wagner in the mid-1870s though, Nietzsche strongly rejects his former efforts to maintain the metaphysical need in the realm of art. Thus, the Sophists become emblematic in the quest for a worldview grounded in the one, material world. The first part, ‘Knowledge’, discusses Nietzsche’s Kantian view on knowledge as anthropomorphic, given by the human faculties of reason. This, I argue, is in line with Protagoras’s famous idea that man is the measure of all things and his art of antilogic. Finally, I undertake a reading of the passage on misology in Phaedo, which I regard as typical for the anti-Platonic strain in Nietzsche’s thinking and his siding with the Sophists. The second part, ‘Rhetoric’, analyses Nietzsche’s rejection of the famous Socratic question, i.e. What is beauty? What is virtue? According to him, the Socratic question asks for absolutes and cannot properly be answered. Instead, Plato uses the Socratic question as a dialectic means to refute the Sophists, thus relying on an eristic strategy condensed in the formula ‘The Sophists are wrong, accordingly Socrates are right’. In the third part, ‘Art’, Gorgias's rhetoric is seen as the quintessence of Nietzsche’s ideal of a cathartic myth-evoking art, capable to affirm life in the material world, contrary to the rationality of theoretical man represented by Socrates. - 2 - Alvino, Maria Consiglia, [email protected] Academic institution: Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II Synesius Cyrenaicus' De Regno: A Study in Greek Rhetoric of Late Antiquity This paper’s aim is to give a contribution to the study of rhetorical theory and practice in Greek Late Antiquity. The text analyzed is Synesius’s De Regno, a speech addressed to the oriental Emperor Arcadius dated to the end of the IV century a. C. The oration De Regno has been studied in the past especially from a historical point of view, because of its importance for the reconstruction of Arcadius’ domestic and foreign policy. According to us, this work is very interesting also from a rhetorical point of view, for two main reasons: 1) The definition of the rhetorical genre: according to the ancient rhetors’ classifications, De Regno oration should be formally a stephanotikós logos, a kind of basilikós logos--addressing the emperor--held during the official offerings of aurum coronarium from Roman provinces to the Emperor, but it is properly a speculum principis, a kind of philosophical composition with ethical and political aims, whose origins go back to Homer and then to the Socratics' political speculations and whose popularity in Latin imperial literature arose thanks to the stoics' mediation. This particular feature questions a theoretical problem–the author’s freedom towards the rule of the genre--and a practical one--the ways and the possibilities of the real delivering of the speech to the Constantinopolitan court. 2) Theoretical conception of rhetoric: since the proem, that is specifically based on it, one of the main topics of this speech is the relation between philosophy and rhetoric. Synesius, borrowing the Homeric conception of the performative power of language and the yet parmenidean idea of the identity between thought, whose phenomenic expression is language, and world, solves this false dualismus, giving to rhetorical art and to literary mimesis a strong ethical value, since rhetoric turns out to be the philosopher’s practical instrument to act and change reality. Synesius’s De Regno can be definitely considered as fundamental evidence of the development of a new kind of intellectual, both rhetor and philosopher, and of the semantic and conceptual distinction between the terms Sophistic, Rhetoric and Philosophy typical of the V century a. C. Moreover, its influence on the Byzantine panegyristic production can also be held as an important source of the building of the imperial ideology. - 3 - Aradra Sánchez, Rosa María, [email protected] Academic institution: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) La puesta en escena del discurso. La teoría española sobre la actio en el siglo XIX La memoria y la acción experimentaron una profunda transformación en la teoría retórica moderna tanto en su vertiente práctica como teórica. En un contexto de progresiva literaturización del saber retórico, el auge que alcanzó la oratoria sagrada en el siglo XVIII, y la actividad forense y parlamentaria en el XIX, reavivó el interés por los componentes no específicamente textuales del discurso persuasivo, mientras que, paradójicamente, empezaban a desplazarse fuera de los intereses retórico-literarios o a adquirir otro enfoque. La evidente conexión de la ejecución oratoria con las técnicas de declamación en los distintos ámbitos (sagrado, forense, académico, popular, militar y teatral), como encontramos en el título de la obra que dedica Badioli y Prota al tema en 1966, se materializó en tratados específicos como el mencionado, pero sobre todo en la atención especializada a la declamación, que derivó hacia la práctica de la lectura y del recitado en tratados de las últimas décadas del siglo XIX. Estos aspectos, que solo cuentan con estudios parciales sobre las conexiones entre las prácticas teatrales y la oratoria parlamentaria, se abordan en esta investigación desde una perspectiva integradora y multidisciplinar. Nuestra propuesta estudia la evolución que experimenta la actio retórica (voz, gesto, movimiento…) en la teoría española de la segunda mitad del XIX, en estrecha relación con el interés por la declamación teatral, al amparo de textos europeos contemporáneos. A la misma vez se analiza de qué manera esta parte de la retórica se desgaja de los estudios literarios, en unos casos en el camino de su especialización, mientras que en otros se integra entre los requisitos del escritor y del orador, más orientados a la recitación y representación. Para ello se estudia el tratamiento de la voz, del gesto y del movimiento facial y corporal en las preceptivas y tratados de retórica y poética españoles más importantes de la segunda mitad del XIX a la luz de las noticias